It's not so strange for a Buddhist to endorse killing | Stephen ...

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/may/...

It's not so strange for a Buddhist to endorse

killing
Stephen Jenkins
The Dalai Lama's attitude to Bin Laden's death should not be too surprising
Buddhism is not as pacifist as the west fantasises

The Dalai Lama said Osama bin Laden deserved compassion but his killing was 'understandable'. Photograph: Jim
Mone/AP
Wednesday 11 May 2011 13.45BST

ow could the Dalai Lama, who hesitates to harm mosquitoes, endorse killing
Osama bin Laden? The terrorist deserved compassion, the Dalai Lama said,
but "if something is serious you have to take counter-measures". The
apparent inconsistency here is with idealistic western fantasies of pacist
Buddhism, not with Buddhism itself. The power of those fantasies is so strong that it
even aects Tibetans themselves. Some young refugees blame Buddhism for losing
Tibet. Saying "we were warriors once," they invoke their history of empire and
incorrectly think their ancestors did not resist Chinese invasion. Those fantasies also
cause us to fail to appreciate how extraordinary the Dalai Lama is. We take his values
as those of a typical Buddhist or a typical dalai lama, and he is neither.
Buddhists work out their values through stories of Buddha's past lives, which show
him in myriad roles, such as a battle-elephant or minister defending his besieged city.
The following story is analogous to a terrorist situation. It is known throughout
northern Buddhism. Communists even used it to rouse Chinese Buddhists to ght in
Korea. The Buddha, in a past life as a ship's captain named Super Compassionate,
discovered a criminal on board who intended to kill the 500 passengers. If he told the
passengers, they would panic and become killers themselves, as happened on a
Southwest Airlines ight in 2000. With no other way out, he compassionately stabbed

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the criminal to death. Captain Compassionate saved the passengers not only from
murder, but from becoming murderers themselves. Unlike him, they would have
killed in rage and suered hell. He saved the criminal from becoming a mass
murderer and even worse suering. He himself generated vast karmic merit by acting
with compassion.
The story is double-edged. Killing protects others from the horric karma of killing.
At Harvard in April 2009, the Dalai Lama explained that "wrathful forceful action"
motivated by compassion, may be "violence on a physical level" but is "essentially
nonviolence". So we must be careful to understand what "nonviolence" means. Under
the right conditions, it could include killing a terrorist.
People fail to appreciate how extraordinary the Dalai Lama's commitment to
nonviolence is. After all, he is a Buddhist and the manifestation of Avalokitevara, the
deity of compassion. But Buddhist values are not simply pacist, and Buddhist
scripture and legend inform us that Avalokitevara readily takes a warrior's form
when needed and supports the warfare of righteous kings.
Buddhist cultures, including Tibet, have not historically been pacist. The previous
dalai lama strove to develop a modern military. So the current one's dedication to
nonviolence should not be taken as a matter of course. He was inuenced by Gandhi,
a British-trained lawyer whose pacism was rooted in Thoreau's Civil Disobedience.
His nonviolent approach is exceptional for a Buddhist political leader and integrates
Indian and western concepts of nonviolent struggle.
The exaggerated image of pacism projected on Buddhism (and Hinduism) was
embraced and promoted by natives, as it conveyed moral superiority over colonialist
oppressors and missionaries. Getting the message fed back by natives reinforced the
original misconceptions. But the ultimate source is Euro-Americans themselves,
weary of a century of warfare and longing for a pacist Shangri-La. Buddhist cultural
values were never so simplistic and practically served rjas, khans, and daimy for
millennia. The main reason Buddhists' history does not match our expectations, aside
from them being as human as the rest of us, is that our expectations have been
mistaken. Some think that fantasies of a pacist utopia benet the Tibetan cause. It
can also be argued that they encourage communists to contemptuously dismiss
western support for Tibet and obstruct Buddhists from engaging their values.
The Buddhist world is racked with violence and it has never been more important to
understand Buddhist ethics. These include never acting in anger; exhausting
alternatives such as negotiation; striving to capture the enemy alive; avoiding
destruction of infrastructure and the environment; and taking responsibility for how
one's actions and exploitation cause enemies to arise. They also emphasise the great
psychic danger to those who act violently, something we see in the large number of
suicides among youth sent to these wars. Above all, rather than "national
self-interest", the guiding motivation should be compassion.
Since the Dalai Lama's rst statement, it became clear that Bin Laden did not die in a
reght to avoid capture, but was shot down unarmed. The Nobel laureate made the

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news again, calling the killing understandable, but this time he equated the death
with the hanging of Saddam Hussein, expressed sadness at the killing, and
re-emphasised his commitment to nonviolence.

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